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Google Chrome Bookmarks:

I was going to write a ranty explanation of all thegood features Google removed from Chrome’s bookmarking utility, and all the bad, useless features they added, but instead I’ll focus on why their decision is short-sighted and anti-user.

1. If they’d looked outside their internal population of Search fans, they’d see that lots of Chrome users are using Bookmarks as an info organization tool. These casually productivity-minded folks save web content for later in hierarchies that work for their specific projects and goals. They’re saving them because Bookmarks is an extra brain that lets them categorize it and forget it.

2. Search is predicated on the idea that the user can verbalize and thus even remember in the first place what exactly they need. Saving content in a hierarchy allows the human to forget the content by storing its relevancy in the external brain of their branched Bookmark folders.

3. The new search-based bookmarks didn’t even bother to convert folders into tags. Folders are nigh irrelevant in a search-based environment. They become a tagging system of max 1 tag per item. If the Goog had instead added a rich tagging system to Bookmarks, productivity users would be singing hallelujah.

4. Google removed the ability to move items around within a folder. The items in a folder are now listed either alphabetically or in order of when you added them to the folder, preventing org users from using order as an organizational tool.

5. Google removed the ability to view the expanded and collapsed hierarchy of your folders, making it difficult to use the hierarchy structure to organize your items.

Basically the point of bookmarking things is that you won’t remember to search for them later. When Google removed folders, they removed users’ only way of reminding themselves to go back to important destinations.